First snow of this winter. Just a little and all dry and powdery. Nothing big.

Two sessions today. The first one was a gentle 15km bike ride from work to home, which was after the snow had turned into rain, and also after the rain had stopped.

https://www.strava.com/activities/771683402

The second session was a strength training. Also 45 minutes. Just to get into it again. I mainly focused on the upper body.

To add some illustrations, a few random pictures from my local friends on Strava. Everybody seemed to be excited about the snow and eager to go out and do some sports.

It’s a pity Google Earth doesn’t come in winter colors

For fun, I overlaid parts of my ride over 19th century maps that are available on-line. It is interesting how many of today’s roads are exactly where the roads used to be 150 years ago. I wonder how my bike ride would have looked, cycling through the 19th century.

One of the fall/winter/spring cross training activities on my training plan is cycling. I have a mountain bike that I use to ride to work, or just ride through the hills surrounding Brno. I usually plan the week such that I cycle to work on one day, and ride home on the other day. I don’t need the car to go to work, because Brno has excellent public transport, so if you plan well, it is very doable, and to me it is “free” training time. Given the heart rates involved, I take this as light recovery training.

Tomorrow is Czechoslovak Independence Day, a holiday, so today was a bit like a Friday. I had no meetings, so I could leave work early.

Instead of riding home directly, I had to go to Modřice, to the DHL office, to pick up a parcel that they couldn’t deliver yesterday. That added another 18km to my ride.

It was fun to ride in the flatter land to the South, as opposed to the hilly country starting in the North.

I was looking forward to this. The plan was to leave work early and take a long cycling route around the city. I tried to plan it as flat as possible, but in Brno this is difficult. The climb up to Líšeň was much longer than I expected. The climb to Vranov was as expected.

To make this a recovery workout, I slowed down really a lot on the climbs. I also rode in a light gear and tried to have my cadence high during the entire ride.

It was a beautiful ride. I tried to take a few pictures but they didn’t really capture how beautiful it was.

The ride was planned for 90 minutes, but ended up a bit longer. From Lipuvka, I didn’t want to ride on the main road, which was quite busy with people returning from their weekend cottages. I had to take a longer, windier road with more climbing.